Group items tagged

"Now let's imagine a university in the 21st century decides, as a matter of choice, to make all of its students attend classes in these sorts of learning spaces. But more than this, they decide to black out all of the windows so that no one can see in and they say that there can be no displays of student work within the room. They provide a standard overhead projector in each room and they insist that teaching consists of a 5 minute introductory presentation from the teacher followed by a question, followed by another 5 minute video and so on. Students are only allowed to talk to each other if they go to a corner of the room that has been walled off from everything else. This method of teaching will be the same for every degree program so the artists and sculptors will use a space like this as well as the engineers and physicists. Learning about modern dance and nursing will all occur in these spaces."

""Relate" videos get the student to feel connected to the instructor. They seek to establish instructor presence. They also prompt students to reflect on their own prior experiences with the topic and reasons for taking the course. "Narrate" videos share stories, anecdotes, or case studies that illustrate a concept or put the learning in context. They tap into the power of narrative to make learning sticky. "Demonstrate" videos illustrate how to do something in a step-by-step way. They pull back the curtain on invisible phenomena or procedures. They visually demonstrate how students will complete assignments and apply learning in the real world. "Debate" videos are perhaps the most important if you want students to actually change the way they think. These videos explicitly surface and address the misconceptions that students have about a domain and showcase competing points of view."

"As the "credit for prior learning" movement gains traction, it will be progressively easier for students not only to learn in nontraditional ways, but to accumulate credits for what they've learned."

"I had expected that people signing up for a course like this, a non-traditional course where we work mostly on our own or together with other students in the class, would be students who embrace that kind of learning, students who feel a sense of independence and self-determination as learners. What I've learned, though, is that this is not the case for at least some students in the class, who are very much expecting the teacher to function as the voice of absolute authority in the class."

Isn't that the nature of humans? We want freedom for creativity and original thinking, but ultimately it makes us uncomfortable when people actually do achieve it; ultimately it seems that humans instinctively cling to rules, tradition and order.

Good point Tammy. Still, the "grading" paradigm is a strong one. We should expect today's students to start being a little more autonomous in their learning process.

With the scrambled classroom model, we are challenged to learn new possibilities, but also to design instruction based on principles we have known about for some time. In the scrambled classroom model, the innovation is not so much "online learning," but "human learning" supported by all that the 21st century brings to the table.

"This kind of learning can't be scaffolded or too-carefully architectured but must be discovered in the act. In A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown write, "Our understanding comes not through a linear progression, in which each step confirms that you are on the right path. Rather, it arises through approaching the problem from many angles and ultimately seeing its logic only at the end" (98)."

"Learning management systems have become the primary delivery platform in most higher education systems for course-related activities such as lecture presentations, readings and assignments, discussions, and quizzes. Until a few years ago, access for learners and instructors with disabilities was either poorly supported or not considered at all in many popular tools. Due to lack of, or limited, accessibility in learning management systems, students were not able to fully or independently participate in key course activities."

Thank you!!

"In January 2013, Leuphana University ventured into global online learning with the launch of Leuphana Digital School's prototype course "ThinkTank - Ideal City of the 21st Century", a cost-and-barrier-free academic platform that offered collaborative web-based learning led by distinguished scholars and experts. This new program introduced a fresh, unique approach to collaborative learning - a university project open to participants from all over the world, regardless of where they live and what they do."

"In this framework, teaching was an intimate experience shared between teacher and student, the relationship was central. I knew who my student was and I knew, to some degree, if they learned what I intended to teach in the moment it was taught. I am now faced with a new kind of teaching; this mode of teaching provides a dimension to learning that challenges the core of who I am as an educator. This type of teaching is less about the act of teaching and more about the act of learning. In the past, I was an effective educator because I was good at being responsive in the moment, I could guide a conversation to deeper levels on the spot and I could redo and reteach based on in-the-moment assessments. But I am now facing a kind of teaching that doesn't make use of the teaching skills I have developed and refined over the years."

"In a series we're dubbing How Do I Do It?, our inaugural course "Design a Classroom Game" brings together a team of game designers, learning designers and teachers who will lead you through the process of designing your own learning game to play with your students."

This session will address online course design using the How People Learn framework for high level learning outcomes that involve collaboration, reflection, and problem solving.

"There is strong, if not overwhelming evidence that behaviour patterns of students, educators, employees and professionals are moving towards the use of social tools for learning, working and teaching. Collaborating seamlessly face-to-face and at a distance, bringing the human element to virtual interactions, and personalized learning will prevail in 2014; each facilitated by technology. But it's not going to be about the technology, it will be about making connections by voice and/or visual, contributing to new knowledge, and learning with and from others-all mediated through social media. It will be the behaviours of students, lifelong learners and educators-their use of technology, specifically social media applications that will influence education in the upcoming year."

"According to the recently released 2013 Speak Up National Research Project findings, Flipped Learning-defined in the survey as using lecture videos as homework while using class time for more in-depth learning such as discussions, projects, experiments, and to provide personalized coaching to individual students-is surpassing all other digital trends, including mobile apps and technology…at least, that is, in K-12."

"Education is increasingly occurring online or in educational software, resulting in an explosion of data that can be used to improve educational effectiveness and support basic research on learning. In this course, you will learn how and when to use key methods for educational data mining and learning analytics on this data."

Although faculty and students are the primary learning management system users, administrators and IT experts often select the system. This article stresses the importance of involving all stakeholders in the selection process, offers a step-by-step guide to LMS selection, and enables readers to develop a customized list of LMS features that align with their institution's instructional and learning priorities.

Learning analytics holds increasing potential for student agency and autonomy, highlighting a need for ethical discourse at all levels of higher education institutions. Topics central to this dialogue include student awareness of analytics, the future of algorithms and learning analytics, and the redefinition of failure.

"Connectivism and Connective Knowledge Essays on meaning and learning networks May 19, 2012. Connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. The bulk of this work is devoted to tracing the implications of this thesis in learning. Yes, this could have been a shorter book - and perhaps one day I'll author a volume without the redundancies, false starts, detours and asides, and other miscellany. Such a volume would be sterile, however, and it feels more true to the actual enquiry to stay true to the original blog posts, essays and presentations that constitute this work."

For many companies such a project is their first small step in providing learning content for mobile (mLearning). Once again my recommendation is to resist this approach if you can. Pushing content that was designed for a desktop or laptop onto a small screen is not the best way to go about learning design.

"A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressed this question by conducting the largest and most comprehensive review of the effect of active learning on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education. Their answer is a resounding yes. According to Scott Freeman, one of the authors of the new study, "The impact of these data should be like the Surgeon General's report on "Smoking and Health" in 1964-they should put to rest any debate about whether active learning is more effective than lecturing.""

"Of all the challenges facing online learning, I believe the need to train faculty properly to be the most difficult. Without adequate training in teaching methods, I don't see how learning technologies can be used effectively. We cannot afford to go on creating a whole parallel industry of instructional designers to hold the hands of faculty who can't teach effectively. Higher education is costing too much to have amateurs doing the teaching."